Questioning copyright’s trade-off

The idea behind copyright is simple — it is supposed to be a balance in the service of the public interest. There’s a trade-off: for accepting a restriction on certain speech, the public benefits from the production of more new creative works each year. That delicate equation is complicated by many factors, and the right policy should find the balance of copyright scope and duration, limitations and exceptions like fair use, and the appropriate remedies in case of infringement.

But in fact, copyright policies almost universally lack the serious cost-benefit analysis that must precede any evidence-based proposal. And indeed, while the unintended costs are clear to anybody who has observed abuse of, say, the DMCA takedown system, the evidence that these policies create incentives — or even prevent harm — is less forthcoming.

Last week Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute posted a thought-provoking piece that questions the similar calculation at the core of national security rhetoric. In the area of security, he asks, are we actually getting a “trade-off” for all the costs we incur to the country’s budget and our personal liberty? Sanchez convincingly argues that we haven’t been working towards a balance between those two ideas at all. Liberty is consistently discarded in the name of “security,” and the resulting policies don’t actually make us safer. A dialogue that focuses only on striking a balance between these two ideas fails to address more fundamental questions about our policy.

It makes sense, then, that one typical response to bad copyright policy developments — and there are many — is to say that those developments skew this balance the wrong way, favoring the incentives and rewards for rightsholders more than is necessary to maximize creative production. But that approach overlooks the fact that many of the worst copyright proposals, like those that come out of content lobbying groups like the RIAA and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) do worse than a skewed balance. Rather, they fail to strike any kind of balance at all, curtailing speech and fundamental online rights without a corresponding increase in the incentive to create new works.

Similarly, when the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act — sometimes called the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” because it kept the world’s most famous rodent out of the public domain — was challenged in the Supreme Court, some of the world’s leading economists lined up in a brief [pdf] to question the premise that the public benefited from retroactive term extension at all. Once again, the costs to the public are clear: we all suffer from a poorer public domain with no clear gains in return. Worse, these examples are the rule and not the exception. Many elements of policy today — from DMCA’s problematic section 1201 to the unconstitutional ICE seizures of websites — and dozens more failed proposals — like the “Hollywood Hacking bill” or the broadcast flag — fit this pattern.

Compared to the trade-off of security and liberty, the question at the heart of copyright policy is an easy one: How do we optimize the incentive to create new works while minimizing the cost to our freedom of speech and ability to innovate? Unfortunately, sane policy developments that work toward this end are all too rare.

Related

about me

Parker Higgins is an artist and activist based in Brooklyn, New York. He writes about computers, creativity, and the law, and works as the Director of Special Projects at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Previously, he was the Director of Copyright Activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. more »